Pane di "alfansomura"
Okay, so I'm playing fast and loose with the name. It is actually a durum with rye levain. Which has its roots in TFL's whirlwind tour this past Spring of the bread within the high walls of Altamura in Apulia Italy, and David Snyder's formula. I thought about this a few days ago when I posted my question: at what point does dough become bread? and used pictures from my completely untraditional and blasphemous shaping of the bread, used kinda as a demo of the before, during and after.
Anywho, it reminded me to try this formula again with a few more twists. Instead of using the 3 stage build of a 60% hydration durum levain, I instead used a 60% hydration 3 stage build with rye flour and bumped the overall hydration to 70% and holding back some water until after the autolyse. As I was due to refresh my stiff starter anyway - last refreshed in early April, I steered away from my own instructions and built each stage using the full output from prior stages. This introduced ~11% rye to the remaining 89% durum.
Baguettes are 2x400g, Batard is 1x650g.
Semolina with Rye Levain
By alfanso, roots in David Snyder’s Pane di Altamura
Aug 4, 2016
Timing
Day 1 – Mix Rye Levain - 15 minutes x 3 (18-21 hours / overnight)
Day 2 – Autolyse, Mix, Ferment, Retard – 3 Hours (Retard overnight)
Day 3 – Divide, Shape, Retard, Bake – 2 hours total (Shape – ~20 minutes, bake including firing up oven ~1.5 hours)
Rye Levain
Ingredients | Baker's % | Wt (g) | Wt (g) +25% | Wt (g) +50% |
Rye flour | 100 | 58 | 72 | 86 |
Water (80-90dF) | 60 | 35 | 43 | 52 |
Active starter @60% hydration | 40 | 23 | 29 | 35 |
Total | 200 | 116 | 144 | 173 |
Final Dough
Ingredients | Wt (g) | Wt (g) +25% | Wt (g) +50% |
Fine durum flour (semolina rimaccinata) | 500 | 625 | 750 |
Water | 356 | 445 | 534 |
Salt | 11.2 | 14 | 16.8 |
Rye Levain (60% hydration) | 100 | 125 | 150 |
Total | 967 | 1209 | 1451 |
Total Dough
Ingredients | Baker's % | Wt (g) | Wt (g) +25% | Wt (g) +50% |
Fine durum flour (semolina rimaccinata) | 89 | 500 | 625 | 750 |
Rye flour | 11 | 62 | 78 | 93 |
Water | 70 | 393 | 491 | 590 |
Salt | 2 | 11.2 | 14 | 16.8 |
Total | 172 | 966 | 1208 | 1450 |
Method
Day 1 (into Day 2).
- 1st stage of build: Rye and water to rye starter. Will not show any/much growth for majority of time (~12 hours).
- 2nd stage of build: Rye and water to rye levain. Will grow ~50%, (~4-5 hours).
- 3rd stage of build: Rye and water to rye levain. Will grow ~50%, (~3-4 hours).
Repeat twice more using 20% of the prior build as input to next build.
Day 2
- Mix flour and most water in large bowl. Hold back a few grams of water. Autolyse 1 hour.
- Add remaining water, salt and rye levain to bowl. Pinch and fold, then…
- 200 French Folds.
- Cover and rest 10 minutes.
- 200 French Folds. Dough remains quite stiff and rubbery throughout.
- Transfer dough to an oiled bowl and cover.
Bulk Ferment for total of 80 minutes (at 78-80dF) with Letter Folds at 20, 40, 60 & 80 minutes. The dough should double in volume and feel soft and puffy. Retard overnight.
Day 3
- Divide, pre-shape and shape dough in morning. Couche and retard again.
- Pre-heat oven for ~45 minutes at 500ºF with baking stone, add Sylvia’s Steaming towel 15 minutes prior to loading dough.
- Transfer loaves to a peel and score.
- Turn the oven down to 450ºF, load dough, steam the oven (near boiling water in pan of lava rocks).
- Bake with steam for 13 minutes.
- Remove steam source from oven. Bake for another 15-22 minutes depending on loaf size.
- Vent for 2 minutes with oven off.
- Transfer the loaf to a cooling rack and cool thoroughly before slicing.
Next morning crumb shot added just before toasting
Comments
You make the best looking bread in the planet! Now that I have insulted everyone else on TFL, I must apologize to all of you but somehow, Alfanso's bread just makes my jaw drop and I turn green with envy!
Wow, almost embarrasingly too nice and does make me smile! I may submit these pictures for the centerfold of that risqué magazine Playbread. As I've mentioned a handful of times before on TFL:
Just to level set, we all crawl before we walk. Here is an example, pretty typical at that time, of an early baguette bake, from back in Summer 2013 when I first started this home baking nonsense.
Thanks for the encouragement! alan
This is the sexiest bread ever.
See my comment to Danni above. alan
Beautiful Bake.
So how was the crumb?
Taste? I'm sure it was excellent on both accounts but please tell :).
for a 70% hydration, it is okay and somewhat open, but a lot of tight areas as well. The taste is a kind of hybrid where neither the semolina nor the rye truly stand out. Freshly cut yesterday for the obligatory taste test, it was very crisp and clean, but lost a bit of that overnight on this same baguette.
thanks, alan
Great looking baguettes, as usual!
As for those early days baguettes... well I'm sure they were tasty anyway!
What is the batard covered in? Looks like sunflower seeds. How do you get the loaf covered so nice and evenly?
Anyway beautiful bake Alan, great job!
Growing up in NYC, and as Ian can probably also attest to, Italian bakeries sold "Italian Bread", sometimes also more accurately called a semolina loaf. And they generally came two ways - seeded and unseeded. If memory serves me correctly, the seeded breads dominated the showcase, and so that was my youthful and still to this day preference.
The simple secret to coating these devils - a wet paper towel is laid down on the counter and the entire top of the loaf is rolled on it to get the moisture to adhere. The loaf is then immediately rolled on a pan filled with sesame seeds. That's it, now the cat's out of the bag (again). BTW I learned that from one of David Snyder's posts.
I couche the dough seam side down, so the seeds are never on the underside. I do know that others will couche seam side up, so I don't imagine that either way makes a difference.
Thanks, alan
had to make for a sweet loaf perfect with some Italian anchovies, olive oil, basil and Parmesan with some cracked black pepper. The cold final proof in the fridge in a couche makes for an easy score and fine bread indeed. Very nice! Lucy is worried you will get stuck in a rut like I am ......again"-)
Happy baking Alan.
Once it gets past the rubbery stage during initial mix and starts to relax and begins knitting those gluten strands together (like my Grandma and her friends did at Florence's Knitting Bar on Lydig Avenue - yes, that's true!), it just becomes more and more pliable and "puffy" with each passing 20 minute set of letter folds.
By divide and shape time after the overnight nap, the dough was as "user friendly" as one could imagine. I still have little experience with semolina based dough that exceeds 40% to 60% total durum, so I'm still trying to understand, as with most doughs, the feel of the dough at different stages. And which is why I sometimes place notes in my formula as reminders for the next time.
For a pooch as pretty as Lucy, all she has to do is bat her eyelashes a few times and she gets the world to melt. She doesn't need to fret. Heck, she doesn't even need to think. My wretched little beast is the same way, beauty-wise. Here's the full image from my profile picture of the two of us.
And thanks for the food tip, the combo sounds delicious. I still have some well preserved anchovies in the refrigerator somewhere. Ah, I think I left them sitting directly on top of my stiff levain. Yum!
is bigger than Lucy. What a cutie! I'd hate to keep that baby in bread:-) It is a good thing that Lucy doesn't have to think too much. The stuff she comes up with is pretty frightening already:-)